100 USD laptop

December 16, 2006 in Africa, Geekery, Technology by Mentalacrobatics | 12 comments

100 dollar laptop

So what does the USD 100.00 laptop look and feel like? Luckily for us Samuel Klein, Director of Content at the One Laptop per Child association, carried one to the Global Voices Summit in Delhi. This is the fourth one ever made and the second one of the assembly line. (The first two were put together by hand apparently.) These things have serious cool factor. They look better than most laptops. The operating system is Redhat and all the software is open source. It has a battery pack which you can charge with either electricity or manually by hand winding/foot pumping. Using the manual method you get approximately 10 minutes computer time for each minute of winding. Here it is:

100 dollar laptop

100 dollar laptop

100 dollar laptop

100 dollar laptop

100 dollar laptop

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  2. JKE’s avatar

    JKE on December 17, 2006 at 1:33 pm

    Mental, did you have a chance to touch it? What does the (plastic , haptic) quality feel like?

  3. KenyanMusings’s avatar

    KenyanMusings on December 18, 2006 at 2:14 pm

    LOL@ touching it.

    Me, perpetually in the gutter.

    Ok, when is it ever coming to Africa. Kenya to be precise.
    It may be a good place to start by electrifying the rural areas fisrt….. or errrm, those rural folks will be very very well built from all the pumping/wnding.
    i can just see it, 10 winds/pumps = 100 minutes….= 10000 calories lost = 1 wind burns 1000cals.

    Ummm, red would sure be pretty.

  4. hash’s avatar

    hash on December 19, 2006 at 3:58 am

    Nice. I’d like to get my hands on one too.

  5. uaridi’s avatar

    uaridi on December 19, 2006 at 8:03 pm

    Does it come in other colours? That green is rather hard to colour coordinate!!!!

    Have fun

  6. JKE’s avatar

    JKE on December 20, 2006 at 10:04 pm

    And I would just like to see how this machine handles dust and copes with e.g. rain and other environmental influences.

  7. Petit pay’s avatar

    Petit pay on December 28, 2006 at 12:04 am

    Ok why does that baby look like a game boy? VSmile …anyone?
    Nice though.

  8. aegeus’s avatar

    aegeus on December 28, 2006 at 8:42 am

    Looks good, but what is under the hood so to speak? for 100 dollars there better be a little horsepower.

  9. Erickarn’s avatar

    Erickarn on January 3, 2007 at 10:55 pm

    Sorry I’m kinda late. Mental, I’ll try some of the questions, been reading about this project for a while:

    @ KenyanMusings, so far Nigeria is the only African country that has ordered them.

    @Petit pay, it looks like a Vsmile on purpose, because an unmistakable, childlike design “will be the laptop’s only real defense against theft and resale”. Hence the bright colors.

    @aegeus, the specs are “366-megahertz AMD processor along with 512 megabytes of flash memory, which will be the primary means of storage. USB 2.0 ports will also be included for further memory expansion along with a built-in camera.”. No hard drive, which consumes too much power and will raise the price.

    Hope that helps.

  10. aegeus’s avatar

    aegeus on January 10, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Interesting, Very interesting. Thanks Erickam

  11. nura’s avatar

    nura on April 24, 2007 at 8:23 am

    How prices? but,that laptop only for child?

  12. SAIF’s avatar

    SAIF on May 1, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    PLEASE,TELL ME CONFIGURATION OF THIS LAPTOP